Bell Curve
Megan Kitching
Published on
page 21 of Tarot #6
(June 2023)
The shape of afternoon:
tī kōuka billow brown,
blooming ice-cream cones
on an hourglass sky
a trickle in time, when
a bumblebee unclasps
clover, blinks into foxglove
udders and disappears
sleeps a hundred years
in sherbet stippled
flowers nodding their
secret campanology
as the garden dons its moss-
stitched robe, shade
stretching with a yawn
across this meanwhile
until a porcelain cup
on the sill prints
an absent rose, the ruru cry
of a rising moon.
Pylon
Megan Kitching
Published on
page 22 of Tarot #6
(June 2023)
The pylon is a skymark
of this gridlocked world:
rain coming down,
metal mortised into cloud
welding the weather to the beaten ground.
And it is horizon’s ladder,
a lunar lander with strut and rivet
where it aspires
above the old freezing works,
the lightning belts of pines.
Sunstruck it is a pile of lines
worked into the hill:
two scimitars
sliced clear of wires
eloping into the tungsten glare.
Yet climbing into dark
this tower travels nowhere; is only
the moon’s escalator,
a starlit tuning fork
thrumming its counterpoint to dreams.
Sandsmoke
Megan Kitching
Published on
page 23 of Tarot #6
(June 2023)
Walking, and the wind skimming
swallow-low at my ankles
peeled away the smoking sand.
Furled in gusts of mineral light
like braided, cat-stroked grass
it played around my feet
in currents of palest bone, a ghost sea
through whose lures I waded
to a parched, hair-thin tune.
The surf soughed as the beach
streamed out of its body
just ahead of each step
leaving a swept floor gilded
with the barest chime of grains.
Almost-words, whose powdery,
moth wing script lifted
singing seaward as I followed
their ephemeral drift,
a palimpsest inked and erased
under the salt air’s aurora.
Swept Away
Megan Kitching
Published on
page 24 of Tarot #6
(June 2023)
As I walk by the insomniac sea,
under sandbags washed white
by an avalanche tide, the ledge
of beach incrementally slender,
I meet a woman working upshore
the other way. If a tsunami came,
she says, arms arcing wide, I’d let
the sharks devour me, and her laugh
dances us towards the limit
where the city becomes a shanty
rafted and swept away
from our landlocked past, more
and more unreal as if no-one lives
in houses flooded in a tea-time fug,
the sports field goalposts
stuck on nil, those nonsensical cars.